THE THIRTY YEARS WAR

The Thirty Years War from 1618-48 was an early modern slugfest that devastated most of what is today Central Europe. Historians disagree about exactly how many people died; but there is broad agreement that it was at least 15% of the affected populations, mostly from famine and disease rather than battle casualties (though there were plenty of those). That 15% figure would make it by far the most destructive conflict in European history, eclipsing by some margin the 5.5% in the First World War (of which two thirds were due to the 1918 flu pandemic) and the 6% in the Second World War (where deaths were boosted through deliberate genocide). Even Soviet Russia, which suffered appalling casualties in that conflict, more than any other participant, lost less than 12% of its population.

The Thirty Years War has sometimes been portrayed as a straightforward fight between Catholics and Protestants, but that is far too simplistic a view. Confession undoubtedly played a role, particularly in the various propaganda battles; and there were zealots on both sides, for whom the religious aspect was the be-all and end-all of the fighting. But dynastic, commercial and political issues were more important. This is reflected in the fact that the main solution to the problem of prisoners - other than occasional massacres - was to press them into the victorious army, which thereby quickly became multi-denominational. It also explains the long-standing alliances between Lutheran Sweden and Catholic France on the one side, and Lutheran Saxony and the Catholic powers of Bavaria and the Emperor himself on the other. In all these cases, state interests trumped religious belief.

At the heart of the war was the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, that complex agglomeration of electorates, dukedoms, ecclesiastical princes and imperial cities that stretched from Holstein in the north to Mantua in the south, from Dunkirk in the west to the border with Poland in the east. The imperial title was elected, rather than hereditary, but the electors were pragmatic folk, who tended to choose the person with the largest amount of land, in return for monetary and other favours. From 1438 until the end of the Empire in 1806, with only a brief interlude from 1742-4, that person was a member of the Habsburg family of Austria, the biggest landowners and acknowledged masters of the European dynastic marriage market. However, the history of the Habsburgs is not the same as the history of the Empire, not least because the family owned substantial lands outside it. They had inherited Hungary in 1526, and their Spanish cousins ruled Spain, together with Portugal, a fair part of Italy and the Spanish Netherlands (modern Belgium; though, confusingly, that was part of the Empire). After initial success in the war, it seemed at one point that the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II might be able to turn the Empire into a sort of Germanic Habsburg kingdom, passed down under the hereditary principle. Fear of that possibility provoked a natural reaction from both inside and outside the Empire, which culminated in Gustavus Adolphus' stunning victory over the Imperialist forces at the battle of Breitenfeld in 1631. This didn't end the war; but it did shatter the Habsburg dream of hegemony. Nobody could imagine abolishing the Empire as such; but few wanted to be directly ruled by the Habsburgs. After 30 years of fighting to make that clear, the end result was an exhausted draw.

At the Peace of Westphalia, a series of intricate compromises was worked out by the 109 delegations over a period of years, and incorporated in a number of formal treaties. The clearest example of the need for compromise concerned the Palatine electorate. The Emperor had been chosen by seven electors ever since the Golden Bull of 1356. But when the Bohemians revolted in 1618 - the trigger for the start of the war - and offered Ferdinand's Bohemian crown and electorate to the Protestant Elector Palatine, he was put under the Imperial ban for accepting it. The Palatine electorate was given to Catholic Bavaria, who had provided the bulk of the army that crushed the rebellion at the battle of White Mountain, just outside Prague. Since Bavaria's red line in the peace negotiations was to keep the electoral title, a new, eighth, electoral title was created for the Prince Palatine, son of the former Elector.

Despite the draw, the wars and the treaties produced major changes in the map and politics of Europe. Spain finally accepted, after 80 years, that the northern Dutch Republics (the modern Netherlands) would not stay united with the southern ones. The Republics and Switzerland formally left the Empire. Sweden gained a territorial foothold in northern Germany, and took over Denmark's role as the leading power in the Baltic, using that to oust Denmark from its 600-year rule over southern Sweden some 20 years later. France obtained the bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun in Lorraine, and 10 cities in Alsace, thereby gaining the first bits of the lands which would have such influence on Franco-German relations more than two centuries later. The Habsburgs, realising that their power as Emperor would never revive, decided to concentrate their efforts on their hereditary lands, including those such as Hungary, which were outside the Empire. As part of that policy, Bohemian (Czech) nationalism, which had started the war, was extinguished until 1918.

Finally, 1648 saw the start of a new era in international relations. The Peace of Westphalia emerged from the first ever diplomatic congress, based on the concept of negotiations between sovereign states of equal weight, instead of the former hierarchy with the Emperor at the apex. As with modern diplomatic congresses, professions of peace did not necessarily mean peace in practice; in particular, Spain and France remained at war for a further eleven years. But the idea of sovereignty was one which was destined to flourish in the years to come.

Walter Blotscher